Hiatus Story TEASER
Rachel is wrangling with her taxes this week, so we’ve decided to spend the page update on something a little different!
So, I’ve mentioned a few times in the past that I’ve been working with Jerome Jacinto (artist of Cain and Yurk and Song of the Eastern Sands) on a brand new story that takes place in the world of the Western Deep, and that it will begin shortly after Chapter 3 concludes. This teaser image doesn’t seem to reveal much…or does it?
I don’t want to reveal too much about it, of course–but I’ll just say that the original story began its life as a piece of prose that I wrote many years ago as a gift to Jerome that I just liked too much to NOT rewrite into a comic script. And of course since the original story had been a gift to Jerome in the first place, he was naturally interested in bringing it to life as a visual story. We’re both very excited to share it with you, and we’ll have more information about it as Chapter 3 draws to a close.
For guest art this week, a fun little piece that was emailed our way by an anonymous fan of the comic! I wanted to save this one until Game of Thrones’ final season was due to start back up, as it’s somewhat appropriate:
Floofy fur coats are definitely a problem for our real-world animal counterparts. We haven’t really explored that concept too much in the world of the Western Deep, but I imagine Rachel might have a lot of fun with it. Probably not to the extent that armor is flying off hilariously, but hey!
Thank you so much for sending this in, Anonymous Reader!
LASTLY! PLEASE DO NOT FORGET TO VOTE IN THIS YEAR’S RINGO AWARDS! THE WESTERN DEEP NEEDS YOUR VOTE!
After you’ve clicked through a CAPTCHA at this link (or just click on the image above!), all you need to do is fill out the ballot with your selections! Please do consider nominating Beyond the Western Deep for Best Webcomic, and any other categories you feel it merits!
The Ringo Awards are one of the few major comic book awards ceremonies that allows fans AND professionals to cast their nominations for comics, so your voice is just as important as Rachel’s or mine! Every vote matters, so please cast yours before the ballot closes in June.
Beautiful piece! Forlorn, old ruins.
I actually have a few questions:
1) Will we seeing more of the Vulpin culture and world-view in the future?
2) The Polecan are entirely dependent on the sea for their livelihood? They have no land settlements or civilization? There’s been mention of them as pirates but little else.
It’s been a while since I read the prologue, so I’m not exactly well versed in polcan history, and I’m certainly not privy to anything that hasn’t been publicly shown yet. That said, the impression I get is that the polcan are in a somewhat similar situation to the ermehn: Run out of whatever lands they once held and their society excluded from the Four Kingdoms as if it doesn’t matter. (A fate the tamian and lutren only seem to have avoided by banding together and pretending to be a single kingdom.)
Arguably, the polcan fared a bit better than the ermehn since they have the sea, which seems to be a good deal better than scraping a life off frozen rocks. Apparently it isn’t enough to keep them from having to resort to piracy on a large scale, though.
Then again, maybe the pirates are just the only polcan we’ve seen or heard talked about, and there’s a whole other unexplored polcan society. After all, Rook seems like a decent enough…Oh, right, Rook’s a thief. Bad example. :P
Do I give the name of the comic or the creator’s name? I want to make sure I vote correctly!
If you’re looking at the “Best Webcomic” nomination category, then the name of the comic is what you want :)
Just gave this whole comic a re-read from start to finish! The pacing is really well thought out. :) Also, I live for these author notes–I love taking my time to read the process behind creating these pages!
Is the BtWD discord still up? I’d love to join! :)
Well this is nice!